Ask a Reseller: Chris

June 25, 2015

Shift from Yellow Pages● Before 2005 - National sales director for

yellowpages.com. Traveled to train how to sell the Internet and YP.com

● 2005-2006 - Yellowpages was bought by Bell South and AT&T. The only position was premise sales - print was dying and yp.com wasn’t great fit for small businesses.

● 2006 - Chris and partner started your agency

Initial Focus on Large Accounts● 2006-2009 - Focused on large accounts

○ Walgreens, Home Depot ○ Initial focus was showing big brands

how to contact vendors to build events in store locations.

○ Everything was working fine but they realized there were too many decision makers.

● 2010 Pivot - Decided to put their 15-20 years of experience with SMB to work

Pros and Cons of big accountsPros

● Bigger budgets. Monthly retainers were $10k or more.

Cons● Long sales cycles● Too many decision makers● Hard to get stuff done

You never thought of this idea● Started off by hanging out at

Lowes● Would look for contractors who

didn’t have websites on their trucks

● He was confident about his product and would strike up a conversation - fearless

Other ways to start lead gen● Start your own weekly / biweekly meeting at a local

restaurant / bar● Camp out at starbucks and see people making sales

presentation● Be an educator before you get the business● Meetup.com

○ Don’t start the meetup trying to sell.○ Once you explain SEO and Internet marketing… they will

often start asking questions.

Continue lead genNext thing● Pick a vertical (category)● Service industry person

○ Focused on people that worked on homes

○ Get as many clients as possible● Plenty of money if you aren’t greedy● You got to have the infrastructure to

scale when you are going after smaller clients

Sales Techniques● Chris to review sales techniques

Questions1. How many internal staff and sales reps do you have working for you?

2. What types of businesses are the most appropriate for SEO programs in your opinion?

3. What is the best selling point?

4. What are your best conversion tools you use to get clients to sign up?

5. How long do you make them commit to for the program?

6. How do you pare down your service offerings and price to be able to work with a small business that has little

money to spend on SEO?

7. Need a great way to explain to a customer the value of this type of investment... I have reports but would like to

quantify it better if possible.

10. What is the key to close a sale?

11. How do find the best success prospecting? Cold calling? Door to door? Networking events? Seminars/Conferences?